TWO years ago, the INMA Newsroom Initiative was renamed the INMA Newsroom Transformation Initiative to reflect the changing nature of the newsrooms better.
Led by Amalie Nash, the initiative has examined the transformation of newsrooms around the world and has focused on how to bring them into the business of news.
During a recent Town Hall, Nash looked back at the challenges, changes, and learnings from the last two years, noting one question seemed to appear more than any other: “How do I get my newsroom to change?”
She acknowledged that “change management is a really difficult thing that often doesn’t work.”
Drawing on both INMA research and broader studies of change management, Nash noted most change initiatives fail not because the ideas are wrong but because employees feel excluded from the process.
While 74% of leaders say they involve staff in transformation, only 42% of employees agree — and nearly a quarter say they feel completely left out.
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The result, not surprisingly, is resistance: “It’s hard to change newsrooms when people don’t feel like they’re part of the change and they don’t understand the change and they weren’t consulted about the change.”
Nash advised newsroom leaders to stop over-explaining how to do something and spend more time explaining why it matters.
The more inclusive the process, the more likely people are to buy in.
“Change management is very much about getting everyone in the room talking about [their] fears, helping people understand where we’re trying to go — and why — [while] being as transparent as possible with information.”
Stop being everything to everyone
The era of the general-interest newsroom is gone, and today, news companies must know who they are, what they stand for, and what distinctive value they offer audiences.
Sharing the case study of Mediahuis as an example, Nash noted the company discovered just 20% of its stories drove 80% of audience engagement and subscriptions.
The realisation sparked a project to identify “signature journalism” — work that reflects a publication’s core identity and can’t be replicated by AI or competitors.
“So they started these signature journalism weeks where the leadership goes into a newsroom and they spend a week really digging into what topics are of the most interest, what formats are the most interest,” Nash said.
Using subscriber attention time as its North Star metric, Mediahuis has seen success by mapping the right mix of political, human interest, and investigative pieces to ensure readers see a balanced and deliberate reflection of its brand.
Become audience-centric
Every newsroom claims to put the audience first, but in reality, few actually do. And that’s a huge mistake.
Nash quoted Sophie van Oostvoorn of the Dutch newsletter Audience Dispatch, who said: “We expect audiences to adapt to us, but we need to adapt to them.”
The way people consume journalism has changed dramatically, yet newsroom routines have not. Most stories are still written and formatted much as they were two decades ago.
Younger audiences who live in video, audio, and social formats are unlikely to visit a homepage and read long text articles.
In other words, just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come.
The solution lies in designing journalism around user needs — not just reporting what happened, but helping audiences understand, connect, and act.
It also means diversifying formats.
Across every organisation she studied, Nash said alternative storytelling formats outperformed text in engagement, return visits and subscriptions.
“Liquid content,” as some call it, allows a single story to flow into multiple forms — video, audio, graphic or social snippets — so audiences can engage however they prefer.
News media companies must “figure out what consumers want at different times of day, different days of week, all of that, so that we can customise and provide content in the ways that people want,” Nash said.
Data matters — but only the right data
Among INMA members, few topics draw more interest than data.
Nash’s research on 14 global news organisations — from The New York Times to Axel Springer and The Times of London — found a common theme: The industry is moving beyond pageviews.
“It really doesn’t matter if you bring in some huge audience of people with pageviews if there’s no action and they’re not coming back and they’re not converting,” she said.
Leading publishers now focus on metrics tied to loyalty: return visits, reading depth, engaged time, and quality reads.
Some have stopped counting a “view” unless a reader spends at least 15 seconds or scrolls through 20% of an article.
Others limit newsroom dashboards to two or three key indicators, reducing data noise and focusing attention on actionable insights.
At The New York Times, “attention time” has become the leading metric.
Editorial and business teams jointly track how long readers spend with content, comparing performance by story type, length and timing.
“The newsroom uses it to deepen engagement,” Nash said.
“The business side says they want more time for readers to be on the platform because obviously they can better monetise that.”
Leaning into content creators
Recent years have seen the rise of content creators sharing videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
Nash noted this isn’t a fad; it’s a signal.
In the United States, nearly half of adults now get news from influencers, and among younger audiences, that share is even higher.
These consumers often don’t supplement influencer content with traditional journalism; they replace it.
“It gives them context, it helps them understand, and they feel authentic,” Nash noted.
“We like to think audiences come to us because they trust institutions, but increasingly research — especially around younger audiences — show that they trust individuals more than institutions.”
For newsrooms, the takeaway isn’t to mimic influencers, but to learn from them.
Experiment with short-form video, develop journalists as visible personalities, and collaborate with creators who reach communities traditional media struggles to serve: “There’s a lot of different ways you can go with this and you should be experimenting,” Nash said.